THE MODEL IS BROKEN.

10 days ago
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THE MODEL IS BROKEN.
There was a time when sellers weren’t allowed anywhere near the boardroom until they had cut their teeth in Customer Success.

You didn’t get a chance to dazzle an account until you could prove you understood them inside-out.
That meant knowing:
• Their contracts.
• Their serviceability thresholds.
• Their financial and legal gates.
• And most importantly, how to deliver.

That grounding eliminated 90% of the entry-level “business development” problems we see today.

Now? The model has splintered.

MARKETING
→ Tasked with manufacturing “No Intent Lead Gen” magnets and campaigns they know are garbage.
↳ But it’s how they report up to their CEO, Group CEO, or VC firm.

SALES / NEW BUSINESS / BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
→ Tasked with converting those same low-intent leads into meetings at all cost.
↳ But again, it’s what their dashboards reward.

In my day, it was simpler — opportunity size, to billed and banked revenue, minus processing cost. Basic commerce.

COMMERCIAL REPERCUSSIONS

Most Heads of Sales today think Marketing’s role is just “give us leads, man.”
Wrong.

Marketing’s true role is to create demand.. Fed by feedback loops from Business Development and educational intersects with the market.

But when BD no longer does the groundwork…cataloguing the market, capturing timing signals, fleshing out ACV minus cost, validating credit and legal thresholds…then Marketing is flying blind. And reduced to actions they KNOW won’t work.

No feedback loops. No market truth. No circuit.

CUSTOMER SUCCESS

And here’s the downstream collapse.

CS has been told they’re “not sales” anymore. They’ve been stripped of their commercial DNA and turned into delivery.

→ Which means:
• No on-sell.
• No upsell.
• No opportunity spotting.
• No true Land and Expand.

Instead, CS is now treated as the graveyard where new deals go to die.

And when Sales/BD doesn’t complete the Communication Plan and serviceability check?
The customer walks. Complains. Churns.

I haven’t seen a CS team operate like a proper sales team since 2010.

It’s not an individual problem.
It’s a Modelling Problem.

The industry fractured by following playbooks from people who never ran real revenue teams.
And the result is churn city, rising CAC, and pipeline black boxes everywhere.

This is why I’ve been beating the drum on End-to-End Service Delivery and now building it into Revenue Alignment Architecture™ (RAA™) and **Closed Circuit Selling™ (CCS™).

Not to enhance silos.

But to architect the full commercial circuit.
• Marketing creating demand from truth.
• Sales/BD cataloguing and timing, not spamming.
• CS feeding real feedback loops and driving expansion.
• Product building roadmaps from market intelligence.
• Leadership overseeing a circuit, not dashboards.

👉 A lean, efficient, profitable circuit.
Or the silo chaos we see in the market today.

Funnels leak. Circuits scale.

#B2B #sales #RevenueAlignmentArchitecture #ClosedCircuitSelling

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